Get Out
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
You want to know the fears and anxieties at work in any modern population? Just look at their horror films.
You probably knew that. The stumper then, is what took so long for a film to manifest the fears of racial inequality as smartly as does Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
Last year’s Keanu proved Key & Peele could smoothly transition from sketch comedy to an extended (and often hilarious) narrative. Now Peele has his solo album, writing and directing a mash of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Rosemary’s Baby and a few other staples that should go unnamed to preserve the fun. Opening with a brilliant prologue that wraps a nice vibe of homage around the cold realities of “walking while black,” Peele uses tension, humor and a few solid frights to call out blatant prejudice, casual racism and cultural appropriation.
When white Rose (Alison Williams) takes her black boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) home to meet the fam, she assures him race will not be a problem. How can she be sure? Because her Dad (Bradley Whitford) would have voted for Obama’s third term “if he could.” It’s the first of many B.S. alerts for Peele, and they only get more satisfying.
Rose’s family is overly polite at first, but then mom Missy (Catherine Keener) starts acting evasive and brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) gets a bit threatening, while the gardener and the maid (both black – whaaat?) appear straight outta Stepford.
Peele is clearly a horror fan, and he gives knowing winks to many genre cliches (the jump scare, the dream) while anchoring his entire film in the upending of the “final girl.” This isn’t a young white coed trying to solve a mystery and save herself, it’s a young man of color, challenging the audience to enjoy the ride but understand why switching these roles in a horror film is a social critique in itself.
Get Out is an audacious first feature for Jordan Peele, a film that never stops entertaining as it consistently pays off the bets it is unafraid to make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2JbO9lnVLE
The Girl with All the Gifts
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
It is the top of the food chain that has the most reason to fear evolution.
Isn’t that the abiding tension in monster and superhero movie alike? The Girl with All the Gifts explores it thoughtfully and elegantly – for a zombie movie.
In 2010, director Colm McCarthy took an unusually restrained and intimate look at lycanthropy in his underseen Outcast – kind of a werewolf Romeo and Juliet among Irish travelers. This time he mines Mike Carey’s screen adaptation of his own novel with the same quietly insightful bent.
Melanie (startlingly strong newcomer Sennia Nanua) lives out her young life in a cell, then restrained head, hands and feet in a wheelchair as part of ongoing research conducted by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close).
Let’s pause. When 6-time Oscar nominee and all around acting badass Glenn Close deems a zombie film worthy of her talent, we should all pay attention.
So, what’s the deal? A horde of “hungries,” each infected with a plant-based virus, has long since overrun the human population. Dr. Caldwell, her researchers and the military are holed up while trying to derive a cure from the next generation, like Melanie – the offspring of those infected during pregnancy.
It is an unsettling premise handled with restraint and realism, bolstered by uniformly admirable performances.
Melanie aside, the characters could be standard fare zombipocalypse cogs: gung ho military guys, driven researcher, tender-hearted woman here to remind us all of the civilization we’re fighting to save.
But expect something surprising and wonderful out of every actor involved – from Paddy Considine as the Sarge with something to learn to Gemma Arterton as Melanie’s beloved teacher to Close, steely and cagey in a underwritten role.
But much of the weight sits on Nanua’s narrow shoulders, and she owns this film. The role requires a level of emotional nimbleness, naiveté edged with survival instinct, and command. She has that and more.
McCarthy showcases his bounty of talent in a film that knows its roots but embraces the natural evolution of the genre. It’s not easy to make a zombie film that says something different.
Girl brims with ideas and nods to films of the past – in many ways, it is the natural extension of the ideas Romero first brought to the screen when he invented the genre in ’68. It definitely picks up where his Day of the Dead left off in ’85, working in nods to 28 Days Later as well as other seminal flicks in the genre.
But what Girl has to say is both surprising and inevitable.
And she says it really, really well.
The Red Turtle (La Tortue Rouge)
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Life, death, the natural world and the redemptive love of a redhead – all excellent topics, all simply but beautifully explored in the Oscar-nominated animated film The Red Turtle.
When Dutch filmmaker Michael Dudok de Wit got word from Studio Ghibli that they wanted him to be the first foreign filmmaker to work with them, he agreed, even though it would mean leaving the world of short subjects behind in favor of something feature length.
The filmmaker, who’d been contentedly animating shorts since 1981 and directing his own work since ’92, took the next nine years to complete The Red Turtle.
Like his Oscar-winning short Father and Daughter, The Red Turtle boasts minimalistic visuals to convey solitude, longing and the harsh realities of nature. But the melancholy of the previous effort is missing, something more hopeful in its place.
We join a nameless man – survivor of a shipwreck now stranded on a deserted island – as he fights to save himself from his fate. With no company but the skittering beach crabs, he explores enough of the island to determine the best ways off.
But each raft he builds is destroyed from below by an unseen force.
Without the help of dialog, musical numbers or flashy visuals – indeed, the entire effort borders on the monochromatic – The Red Turtle becomes a hypnotic experience. De Wit asks you to wonder whether the extraordinary events are happening or are the hallucinations of a desperate man – perhaps even the visions of a man in the throes of death.
He doesn’t answer your questions, instead weaving a fable as easily taken for symbol as it is taken literally. Perhaps the man didn’t survive the shipwreck. Perhaps he did, and the inexplicable power and magic of the natural world convinced him to stop fighting and live the life he has.
Either way, this spare and often somber film, punctuated as it is with both joyous outbursts and peril, is a welcome piece of poetry in Oscar’s roster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Yw3AVDr6U